Lexington Books
Pages: 782
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-4985-8801-0 • Hardback • October 2019 • $198.00 • (£154.00)
978-1-4985-8802-7 • eBook • October 2019 • $60.00 • (£46.00)
Harvey Shoolman is lecturer at London Metropolitan University.
Referential Abbreviations
Prolegomenon
Introduction: What is Naturalism That It Should Be ‘Extended’ and ‘Deductive?’
Chapter 1: Extended Naturalism and the Trans-Structural Ethology of Perception: Spinoza as a Metabiologist of the Mind.
Chapter 2: The Construction of Unconscious Mind: The Ethology of Embodiment.
Chapter 3: Sentience: A Transcendental Deduction
Chapter 4: Natura Explanans or Nature as a Unified Theory of Explanation.
Chapter 5: Nature as Intercomponentially Sentient
Chapter 6: A Rational Axiology of Nature: Normativity & the Postulates of Dispassion
Chapter 7: A Theory of Action: The Rejection of Cephalo-Centrality and Human Intercomponential Sentience.
Chapter 8: Sub-Intentionality as the ‘Dark Matter’ of Whole Body Activity.
Chapter 9: The ‘Eyes of the Mind’: Infinity and Spinoza’s Concept of Mathematical Proof
Chapter 10: ‘Scientia’ and a Theory of Scientific Action
Chapter 11: Technology as the Prosthetics of the Mind
Chapter 12: The Reality and Identity of Finite Modes
Chapter 13: A Theory of Action as the Rational Apotheosis of ‘Self.’
Chapter14: The Concept of a Rational Gemeinschaft and the Metaphysics of a Frictionless Polity.
Coda
Bibliography
To take Spinoza seriously is to take Nature seriously: to regard it as a systematically organised whole that constitutes us mentally and bodily. So used are we, though, to place ourselves above or against nature that we almost rebel against a philosophy in which the propositions and scholia, even the ink and paper constituting the Ethics refuse just to be read, and actually begin to entangle themselves with us like so many roots. A great merit of Shoolman’s work is to convey this uncommon sense to the reader; to shift the focus from man and his God and ask: what is it to be Nature as Nature? Informed by a deep understanding of mathematics and biology, Shoolman’s accounts of perception and action are particularly provoking.— Stephen Connelly, University of Warwick
A much needed book of our time for laymen as well as for scientists and philosophers. When naturalization of mind is on the agenda, Harvey Shoolman's in-depth study helps us to read the Ethics as the philosophy of today, showing how to reintegrate mankind into the dynamics of nature without losing what makes the human humane.— Henri Atlan, L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Harvey Shoolman’s brilliantly inspired and inspiring work of truly passionate scholarship towards rethinking, rereading and understanding Spinoza’s thought anew is not only perfectly written and timed for the situation in which we find ourselves, but most meaningful given its originality, maturity and ground-breaking intersection of the sciences with the humanities.— Thanos Zartaloudis, University of Kent
Recent decades have seen a vigorous revival of interest in Spinoza studies. This book makes a ground-breaking contribution for those who have engaged in the field in any depth. For all, including those new to the subject, it offers important correctives to errors in understanding. The key theme arises out of Spinoza’s identification of God with Nature. Shoolman applies his extensive analytical skills from a wide range of disciplines, principally philosophical, mathematical and biological, to unpack the dense, architechtonic character of Spinoza’s major work, his Ethics. The result is both sharply focused on the philosophical nucleus and broadly applicable to some pressing current concerns.
— Journal of European Judaism